


Small Talk

by followsrabbit



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 05:16:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6502129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/followsrabbit/pseuds/followsrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So," a brave few representatives of the night's homogenous pool of frat-jerks have drawled at her scowl, "are you a freshman?" A beat of silence. Then: "In community college." Then they usually leave.</p><p>Or: Blue and Gansey meet at a frat party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Talk

Blue goes to the welcome bash for Adam's sake, and for Adam alone. She feels, as she sips her beer by the brick frat house’s violently green lawn, that this is an important distinction. She came to give moral support. Not to fraternize with America’s asshole rich as they spike volleyballs and drinks for girls much leggier and much less sulky than Blue.

She’s not even a student here. _Adam_ is the one being welcomed.

She wards off potential small-talkers with this tidbit. _So,_ a brave few representatives of the night's homogenous pool of frat-jerks have drawled at her scowl, _are you a freshman?_ A beat of silence. Then: _In community college_. Then they usually leave.

Well. The two she’s tried it on so far have left, but that gives her a two for two success rate, so Blue is optimistic over it overall effectiveness. Even if she wishes the words _community college_ didn’t make her feel frail and cheap among acres of old money and Lacoste.

“ _You_ ,” Blue hisses at Adam when he wanders over to her finally. “You owe me. A lot.”  With a glare, she decides to begin collecting on that debt by switching out her red solo cup and its dregs for his own untouched beer.

Leaning beside her against the rough bricks, Adam points out with infuriating rationality, “I didn’t force you to come.” He narrows a look at her as he speaks, reclaiming his cup and sliding it into her empty one. Even though he’s not going to drink it. Even though he should know her better than to think she’d drink herself drunk _here_ of all places.

(Word has it that she is very sensible. Everyone says so.)

Blue rolls her eyes, and crosses her arms at her fringe-clad chest. “And I still don’t understand why you want to join these jerks in the first place.”

This last part is a lie. If her mantra is _eccentricity_ , Adam’s is most definitely _ambition_ , hence his current ivy adorned education. Hence the agony he trekked to achieve the scholarships and acceptance necessary for said education. Hence his begrudging interest in his new university’s most prestigious fraternity.

She suspects this is, for Adam, some form of networking.

“I didn’t say I wanted to join them.”

 _“Pshaw.”_ She also suspects that he knows that he’s mostly networking with assholes.

Adam neither _pshaws_ nor rolls his eyes back at her, but instead offers, “I’ll spend all of Saturday fabric shopping with you.”

That could turn into hours, as they are both well aware. Hours when he could be working or studying or both. “Maybe not _all_ of Saturday," Blue allows, and then proceeds to postpone her search for a refill until after Adam has grudgingly returned to his mingling.

She can’t just stand here, not drinking. It’s bad enough watching the idiocy and the flirting and the arrogance with a distraction. Without something to amuse her hands and attention, she feels anchorless. Like she’s going to stare too much at the crowds of almost hookups, tacky dancing, and shamelessly public foreplay, and eventually vomit bitterness. (Never mind that she would never touch, let alone kiss, anyone here. It’s the principle of knowing she can’t that stings.)

She chooses another beer.

* * *

It is possible, she admits, in the buzz of the night, that this next cup does not _stay_ full for as long as her size – annoyingly small -- probably recommends.  

So she blames keg-induced distraction for her lapse in attention, and the intruder it ushers into small-talk with her. (What sort of name is  _Gansey_?) Blue likes to think she could have scared him off with a look, had she been more alert.

“What are you planning to study?”

She’ll just have to scare Mr. Teal Polo Shirt off with conversation instead.

“Community college.”

The boy standing beside her is, objectively, attractive. Dark hair messy around his forehead, easy model grin stretched across his features, impressive arms looming from beneath his bright sleeves – she blames the beer for the moment she steals to further assess said arms. _Very_ impressive. Blue glowers at them for that.

Even as the night lags on thick with August heat, he looks irritatingly un-sweaty. As if the universe conspired to keep its warmth from sheening his forehead or flushing his skin. Blue isn’t sure why he approached her in the first place – surely a boy with a direct connection to luck could find someone more willing to connect with him – but she waits for him to leave now that she’s played her cards.

But Gansey only nods along and asks, “And how are you finding that?” His accent, rich and all the more condescending for it, doesn’t falter. He might as well be asking her how she likes her new Nantucket summer home.

She thinks she preferred the open scorn of his friends to his fake interest.

Blue can feel her cheeks boiling. She’s a psychic’s daughter, raised in a home full of the supernatural, so she’s met enough skeptics to know how to answer mockery. That doesn’t mean she _likes_ to _._ That she doesn’t want to elbow Teal Polo Shirt right in his teal polo shirt clad stomach for making her feel even smaller than her height demands.

Sadly, however, she manages to restrain herself from inflicting bodily harm. Instead, she raises an eyebrow -- or tries to; also sadly, Blue never quite learned how to arch one eyebrow without tugging the other one along – and barbs the lining of her answer. “With a campus map.”

The corners of his mouth twitch, like he’s not sure if she wants him to laugh.  “And the party?”

Her lips twist into a decided frown. “Look. I’m clearly not the kind of girl guys like you hit on. That’s okay. You’re not my kind of guy either. But here’s a hint: I’m not interested.”

His mannequin mask doesn’t so much slip as freeze, when he repeats, “Guys like me.”

Blue throws a hand towards his chest, clumsier than she intended. “Polo shirts,” she clarifies.

“I didn’t realize that polo shirts had become a marker of personality.”

Her chin bobs. “Oh, they definitely are.”

Polo Shirt rubs the pad of his thumb along his lower lip. “You looked uncomfortable. I wanted to rectify that.” If she dresses her words in weaponry, he clothes his with safety tape.

Profoundly ineffective safety tape. “And _clearly_ you were the answer. Because who wouldn’t want to talk to you?”

This time, he doesn’t vacillate between expressions. His wry smile comes uncontested. “Girls like you,’ apparently.”

“Girls like me.” It is possible that her fingers tighten around the curve of her sloshing cup.

He takes a step back. It is possible that he also registers her fingers tightening around her cup. “Your words.”

 _Well._ Her grip loosens. She steals another gulp of beer. “Tell me more about girls like me.”

Warily, then with the confidence she expects from heirs to the southern aristocracy, Gansey proceeds. “They begrudge polo shirts, welcome parties, and inquiries into their subject of study.”

 _Begrudge. Inquiries._ Blue gulps back a strangled sound. She’s never met her father, but she can’t imagine even he, with his probable middle age, would talk like that.

Gansey continues. “But nevertheless come to welcome parties filled with polo shirts and chitchat about majors and hometowns and so on.”

Licking the beer echoing on her lips with a shot of her tongue, Blue pickpockets his cast-off wariness. “I answered your _inquiry_.”

“You told me you attend community college. That, while perhaps an answer, did not answer my question.”

Another suffocated noise builds in her throat. “Biology.”

He tilts his head, as if to frame this new piece of information against her face.

“Nature is generally more likeable than people.” Blue feels intensely observed. “And you? Do they offer degrees in Preppy, or did you have to settle for a minor?”

Gansey blinks, then speaks. “History.”

While Blue did not inherit any particular psychic abilities from her mother, she did pick up her quick wit, so doesn’t pause before retorting, “Because dead people are generally more likable than living ones?”

Another blink, this one matched with a smile that looks more real than the first grin he’d given her. “Some may be.”

“My mom can see the dead,” Blue blurts, to see if this new piece of weirdness, of her, will finally scare him away. She likes identifying people’s thresholds of weird. They almost always fall well beneath her own.

But Gansey only moves back the step he’d taken away from her. He doesn’t blink now. “Really?” In fact, he looks as though she’s the speaker in some History Channel program that’s snared him between surfed stations. “As in clairvoyance? Necromancy?”

“As in a psychic.” She bends to set her beer down on the ground beside her, just to interrupt his unexpected interest. When she rises, he looks no less bright-eyed or eager. “It’s just on St. Mark’s--”

“St. Mark’s Eve!” Blue bristles and falters, before settling on a glare out of habit. “ _Fascinating_. I’ve researched it before of course, but I’ve never encountered a first hand witness.”

“ _Of course_ ,” Blue molds her lips around his words, as if that will make sense of them. “Because guys like you just happen to research Christian feast days.”

His smile doesn’t revert to college brochure phoniness, but it does widen with a balance of pride and amusement. Something that reminds her too much of the way she feels when someone calls her _strange_ or _different_. Like she’s been waiting waiting waiting for someone to see beneath the sensible front to the person she wants to be.  

Blue wishes now that she hadn’t placed her beer on the ground, so she could wash away the cloying taste of empathy.

“Maybe,” Gansey replies hesitantly, cheesily, earnestly, “I’m not the kind of guy you think I am.”

Then there’s as much silence as can be expected at a frat party vibrating with the radio’s latest hits. And then they’re staring at one another, and she’s noticing things like the angles of his cheekbones, the teeth flashing between his parted lips. Things that make her want to blush more than his impressive arms had.

He’s staring at her too.

It’s too much.

“What do you know about Welsh kings?”


End file.
